Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker’s disruptive video app

Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker has been known to race into burning buildings and car wrecks to help his constitutents.

But he’s also jumped into the world of technology to help create a social video news company called #waywire that he believes can disrupt what he called the traditional media’s “oligarchy” for sharing information people need to make changes in a democracy.

“I’m a big believer in the power of the people is greater than the people in power,” Booker said during an onstage interview at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco.

The social media-savy Booker, a 1991 Stanford grad who was also a star tight end on the Cardinal football team, is one of the founders of #waywire, a New York startup that is also backed by Google’s Eric Schmidt.

The #waywire iPhone app, now available in alpha mode, is a way for people to create, organize and share video on important topics of the day, from the economy to marriage equality.

The videos are designed to be disseminated through popular social-networking services like Facebook and Twitter.

He believes the service will give voice to a wider, more diverse segment of citizens who want to work toward changing the world without having to break through the control wielded by traditional media sources.

Booker said he’s learned a lot from his constitutents via Twitter, and “there are more people looking at my tweets than are reading the print version of my state’s largest newspaper.”

But he said there are too many people who just sit back and complain. New technologies such as #waywire could appeal to a “video-literate generation” that want to take action, he said.

“It’s going to be the disruptors who are going to jump into the marketplace of ideas, who are going to jump into the trenches of our democracy and say, ‘No, I’m not going to accept it as it is,’ ” Booker said.

Booker is a rising star in Democratic politics, but he said the app would be bi-partisan because “no side has a monopoly on the truth.”

Since he’s still a public official, Booker isn’t involved in the day-to-day operations of the company.

Facebook stockholders may not think so right now, but Booker called Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg “an American hero.” That’s because Zuckerberg has donated $100 million of his own stock to help Newark’s public schools.

“America can not be the leading democracy if we have a lagging educational system,” Booker said.